This is fascinating. I had no idea ice could take on so many crystalline forms depending on the variety of conditions. Apparently there are other shapes even beyond those mentioned in the article: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/ice_phases.html

Thank you! Almost anyone could have just made a cat's cradle reference. You went straight to the source and elevated the conversation in the process.

>The story "Polywater Doodle" by Howard L. Myers (writing under the pseudonym "Dr. Dolittle") appeared in the February 1971 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It features an animal composed entirely of polywater, with the metabolism described by Richard Feynman. (The title of the story is a pun on "Polly Wolly Doodle".)

There's not a day that goes by that I don't wish Feyman was still alive to help slash through the nonsense.

> By 1969 the popular press had taken notice and sparked fears of a "polywater gap" in the USA.

I find it illuminating to understand that "journalists," or the "popular press," were ratcheting up the "fear sells" / fake news bullshit at least as far back as 1969 (and I'm sure it goes back much further). If you were ignorant, and I certainly am, you would think that this is a wholly new phenomenon. I mean, that is what the same "popular press" is telling us today, right?

I think it's inaccurate and unhelpful to blame the "popular press" and contributes to making a false equivalence about the role of journalism to today's toxic politics (which I find very frustrating). Such a phrase can include everything from: NYTimes, popular tabloids, Fox and Friends, Fox news InfoWars, Slate, the Economist etc etc. There's a huge range of journalistic integrity and quality in that. For all its mistakes, let's not equate the new york times with fox and friends...

Look up the history of media and its role intersecting with the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the various earlier revolutions in Europe (particularly "The Year of Revolutions", 1840, in which there were fifty revolutions throughought Europe and South America), the not-quite-a-revolution Chartist movement in England, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, large aspects of the Reformation / Counter-Reformation (including the 30 Years War), the de Witt brothers' lynching in the Netherlands, the history and background of the Catholic Inquisition (dating from ~850 AD to the 1960s), and the experience of the Romans and Greeks with demagoguery (literally "a man of the people", but which rapidly acquired the connotation of "rabble rouser"), and the tradition of Socrates / Plato / Aristotle vs. the Sophists (from which: sophistry, sophomore, and sophisticated).

It's almost as if there's some fundamental social-system dynamic by which information, information mediation, cognitive capabilities (particularly at the population level), and other information-theoretic and psychological dynamics are deeply rooted in human, and arguably all systems function.

A good capsule summary of this is H.L. Mencken's brief "Brayard vs. Lionheart", written of the 1926 U.S. presidential election, from which the infamous line about an idiot someday being elected to the office is found, but whose real value is in clearly describing the dynamic. And also, IMO, tying it to Gresham's Law.

Well, ice-nine does have a relationship to water specifically. For whatever reason, TV Tropes doesn't currently consider it an instance of the Phlebotinum trope (any substance or phenomenon which is essentially an entirely unexplained but powerful plot device).

Maybe that's an unintentional omission from the wiki, but it could be that the somewhat elaborated hard SF backstory of ice-nine means that it's not just considered "plot fuel".

This diagram is so weird to me. Bottom part is simple and neat, while the top half just goes crazy. My puny brain desperately wants this world to be understandable and elegantly designed, but apparently atomic structure has a different idea.

I remember watching a video on YouTube a few years ago that there are many different structures of ice, and when you cool it down to a specific temperature, it makes a loud cracking noise as it transitions from one form to the other. I can't remember the details exactly sadly.

The bit about compressibility tickles my mind. Really cool that some compounds maintain their structure while collapsing the space between, while others change their structure entirely when subjected to pressure. Would make for a cool visualization.

Are there theories about what structure ice-VIII, ice-IX, etc. would take?

One of my favourites is 'electride' bonding, where you compress a crystal so much that the electrons get squeezed into the gaps (interstices) between atoms instead, essentially making the electrons themselves act as anions.

This is really cool, and makes you wonder what other exotic high-pressure physics waits to be found.

Ice is really a fascinating material generally, even just “normal” ice. My thesis advisor has pretty much made a career out of studying it. I didn’t do my material science work on ice personally though; he also studied high temperature super alloys earlier in his career.

You're totally right, but there are also a lot of 'real' and 'human/animal' traditions that we've collectively decided aren't worth continuing. I'd argue this should be one of them, but I'm not bullish on my preference vs. diamond advertising budget and a culture of perpetual consumerism.

+1 I read an interesting article a while ago that i cannot find anymore, it was about dooms day from science point of view.

The bottom line is in case of metheor falling down it is not the impact or cloud of dust up killing you, but simple change of pressure that will not only boil all oceans but also will boil blood and water in your body. As pressure goes down so falls the boiling point of liquid.

This conflicts with what I think I know about the occurrence of diamonds. For the most part diamonds are formed just below the surface in melts rich in dissolved carbon dioxide. These materials rise through the crust through very narrow pipes and explode when the carbon dioxide comes out of solution at the surface.

These explosions form the bell shaped bodies that are mined for diamonds. Because of the phase behavior of carbon dioxide rich melts, and because the diamond grade just below the bell is very low, diamonds seem to be formed in the high pressure streams of carbon dioxide released when the temperature declines and the confining pressure is released at the surface.

Perhaps there are "seed" crystals formed much deeper and such a crystal formed the nucleus for this diamond. From this popular article it is not possible to determine at what depth the water crystal formed. Conceivably it could have formed in the stream of carbon dioxide at the surface.

Seeing "atoms" used in reference to water molecules has me feeling a particular way. Am I nitpicking too hard?

--

edit: moccachino makes a good point below that I missed on my first two passes -- it's referring to the actual positioning of the atoms within water molecules, which makes sense now that I'm giving it another pass. This is evident in referring in one part to "oxygen atoms" specifically.

It took me your comment to realize it. Thanks for pointing it out: the point that wasn't effectively conveyed to me was that the actual relative positioning of oxygen atoms relative to each other seems to be shifting under pressure.

Regardless of the parent comments meaning, there's value in communicating complex ideas simply. You didn't have to snip your comment.

If you want a job related to that kind of work, broadly, I'd search around for any STEM journalism or education related. Also many public health/nonprofits might have a significant outreach arm if they're large.

Or you could go the blogger/educational youtuber route. Less traditional but pros and cons.

Disclaimer: no first hand experience here, just my observations of others. Good luck!

tl;dr: "Diamonds can trap small bubbles of extremely dense pressurized water when they form. Then, as the diamond moves up through the mantle, the water inclusion is subjected to cooler temperatures while remaining under the same pressurized conditions. In that very specific case, ice-VII can occur."

If you broke open the diamond, the sample would be destroyed. They used a technique called x-ray crystallography. You shoot a beam of x-rays at the sample, and the beam deffracts due to the crystal's atomic structure. In analyzing the resulting diffraction pattern you can build a *3D model of what the molecules look like structurally. This is why we know what DNA looks like.

They don't mention it in the article, but it's likely to be IR spectroscopy, since that can measure resonance of H2O molecular bonds, which would be specific to symmetries/energies in Ice-7 and very different from the known spectrum of diamond.